by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

FORWARD FARM, CHINA - Muffled from head to foot all summer to combat mosquito swarms, then again to survive Siberian winters, Bai Yuhua and her husband have endured three decades transforming wasteland into fields here at the once barren tip of northeast China.

In recent years, the farmers' efforts paid off as rice and corn prices rose, but the good times attracted ever higher government fees. And last January, officials took away their entire rice harvest. "It was a cold day, 30 degrees below zero, but their hearts were even colder," says Bai, 62, whose right arm was disabled by infant polio. "They have no humanity."

At a once-a-decade leadership transition wraps up this week in Beijing, China's Communist Party is celebrating both the nation's growing strength and the party's continued monopoly on power. Under Hu Jintao's 10-year watch, the economy has soared to second in size behind only the USA, up from sixth largest in 2002.

Yet Hu stalled on reforms. He allowed state-run firms to dominate several industries at the expense of the private sector. Entrenched interests, such as the state farm system that frustrates Bai and other local farmers, hold back the economy, deepen corruption and provoke regular unrest, say analysts such as Mao Yushi, a liberal economist.

Political reform is China's most fundamental problem, he says. "Without it, any changes will be slight and the contradictions will still exist. The party must devolve power, stop dictatorship and develop democracy and rule of law," says Mao.

Even some party scholars have echoed calls for change. In the past decade, problems have outweighed achievements and left the party facing a legitimacy crisis, Deng Yuwen, an editor at the party's Study Times newspaper, argued in a September essay online later deleted.

Today, several residents at Forward Farm resent the government's still tight controls over their operations, and the multiple contractual and administrative fees that they say have spiked far beyond national standards. "The farm is a corrupt interest group that benefits the government, not the ordinary people," says rice farmer Xu Weidong, 41. "We are slaves under the rule of the Chinese government."

His father Xu Dingxi arrived in 1969 when Forward Farm was founded. "We ate bears and heard wolves cry," recalls Xu, 72. His joy at being allowed to farm for himself, when granted some wasteland in 1986, has long since deflated. "It was so tough to reclaim this land, and the government invested no money in it," he says. "Now I feel we worked in vain for 20 years, as they raise fees so sharply."

In the past two years, Bai, Xu Weidong and other local farmers have clashed with local officials and refused to pay some fees after they found documents that appear to show the farm has broken both state and local rules in grossly overcharging farmers since 2006. Bai paid the penalty for such defiance last January when her crops were confiscated.

As prices rise, the nearly 1 million farmers within Heilongjiang's state-run "reclamation region" should be earning healthy profits, but many are exploited by an unfair system, and scrape by on loans, says Li Baihuang, a human rights lawyer. "It's like a modern form of slavery."

If they complain, the farm administrative bureau relies on its state-approved control of local police, prosecutors and judges to confiscate crops and property and sentence farmers to "re-education through labor" camps, he says. "China's laws and regulations are of no use here," says Li, who has taken the case of 10 farmers, trying to recover their land-use certificates from local authorities, to the State Council, China's "Cabinet."

Officials deny farmers' accusations of corruption. "This farm is all state-owned land, so only we have the right to use it, not individual farmers," says Zhu He'an, the Qianjin farm director. "Most farmers are happy. Only a handful of people cause chaos, as they don't pay the administrative fees," which he says follow national standards.

Zhu admits targeting certain farmers as part of a nationwide "stability maintenance" system, a heavy handed approach that some Chinese scholars argue creates more instability. "We have to stop those unreasonable, pesky petitioners, their problems are not real," he says.

Last December, Xu Weidong was detained by police for 10 days after he took their complaints to the petition offices of ministries in Beijing. Last month, officials camped in Bai's home to stop her from reaching the provincial or national capital during the current party congress. "They make me feel like a criminal, but I have committed no crime. Petitioning is legal in China," says Bai, who evaded her minders to meet a foreign reporter.

Official Miao Zhongwen confirmed he and colleagues went to Bai's home in late October, "but only to help the family with their farm work. This family makes trouble for us, and Bai Yuhua disturbs social order," he says. The January removal of her rice harvest was "legal," as Bai failed to pay fees that most farmers accept because the rate is agreed upon at an annual worker representatives' meeting, says Miao.

Not true, counters farmer Tan Jixiang, whom farm officials selected this spring to attend the meeting. "We all raised complaints about fees at an earlier, small meeting, and our leaders said they would tell their leaders, but the issue was never raised at the full meeting, when everything is decided in advance," he says.

Another source of anger is the mandatory purchase, regardless of need, of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides from farm authorities. "I just got charged $1,800 for low-quality seeds that I did not take as I bought my own seeds. It's like buying air and so unreasonable," says Tan, 34, who farms 67 acres of rice fields. "At year's end there is zero profit for my family as the farm takes so much. We'd starve without loans," he says.

Protests about land, which cannot be privately owned in China, form the bulk of unrest nationwide. Beijing extinguishes the flames for now, but widespread abuse of power and neglect of human rights may spark larger conflicts, and political change, within three to five years, predicts liberal economist Mao.

One senior citizen sounds committed to challenging injustice. "I have no culture; I left school when I was 10, but I know what has happened to me was unfair," says Bai Yuhua, who expects the official "bandits" will also take her latest rice crop. "I want justice, and hope China can become a fairer society, one with human rights," she says.